by Lorrie Moore
“You haven’t been baptized before?”
“No,” I lied. It was the last lie, the necessary lie, the great lie to end all lies; the Jesus lie, lying for the sins of all the other lies.
Reverend Filo looked at me. I had no idea what my parents had told him. “You weren’t baptized when you were twelve like everyone else?”
“I had mono,” I said. The deputy lie. The good-thief-on-the-cross lie. I had been baptized when it meant nothing to me. Now I needed the public atonement—“At-One-ment,” as they said here at Camp Panawauc over bug juice and guitar-strummed hymns. I needed the ritual and spectacle. I needed to fall back against a religious man’s arms, to be blessed and taken up into the clouds briefly, feel Jesus seize my heart and stay there not shriek and fly off. That hadn’t happened the first time. The first time my head had been full of thoughts of breakfast and about how under my baptismal gown, in front of the entire congregation, I wasn’t wearing any underwear. Afterward, I’d gleefully eaten donuts and hot chocolate with the other baptismal “candidates,” as they were called, while the church ladies dried our hair with towels and a bonnet dryer.
“Well, we should get you baptized, then,” said Reverend Filo, as if he were a doctor and this were a perfunctory, snip-and-cut kind of surgery.
Somehow I didn’t think I’d be the only one who would be baptized that day, but I was. There were no robes. I wore my bathing suit and a blue linen cape tied in a knot at my throat. I stood with Reverend Filo in waist-high water, a few feet from the dock, little plastic buoys along the side, the lake warm and still and brown in the stagnant way of late summer. There were soft tall weeds growing up from the lake bottom, and they would do a charming kind of hula and then wind around your legs in a death grip.
On shore there was only my counselor, Sandy; Monica Hyde; and Hayden Filo, who smiled at me beneficently. Now I was truly taking his religion and could marry him. Perhaps that’s what was crossing his mind. It crossed mine.
“Do you, Benoîte-Marie Carr, accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”
These were vows. I summoned forth all the force and promise and devotion I knew I had within me. It formed a large dense mass beneath my ribs. My toes began to cramp and cross. I saw it now: There was only Jesus; everything else was nothing. Everything else was squat. The blue of the sky was endless and beckoning and true. There was Goodness. There was The Way. The mountains across the lake were the apostles, and the trees were witnesses descended from on high. The plastic buoys against the dock were the doves of the Holy Spirit.
“Yes,” I said, “I do.” Reverend Filo said something else, but I didn’t really hear. There were pains and spasms in my feet and legs, and then the Reverend’s arm came round the small of my back and he whispered, “Lean back, my dear.” I thought of my back dives, squinted my eyes and pushed off with my feet. But I pushed too hard, as if I were doing a real dive, and the leap back brought Reverend Filo staggering back with me. I opened my mouth wide for air, but water rushed in instead, and the weeds wound malignantly around my legs, paralyzing me. My arms clutched and thrashed. I had never been a good swimmer—I could dive but I couldn’t swim well; during Swimming at school, with its bathing suits color-coded to everyone’s bust size, I had pretended to have my period or else early in the morning I’d bang my finger with a hammer until it swelled and I could arrive at the nurse’s office, requesting a splint. So, now, half-drowning, and bringing a man of God down with me—his head floundering next to mine in the water—I was incapable of saving myself or anyone. My blue cape billowed out to one side of me, its knotted ties twisting and tightening around my neck. I waited for the Holy Spirit to enter me and reside in my heart in peace, take me forever. I opened my eyes underwater, where things were silent but full of motion, muddy shapes and bubbles. I looked up toward the sky and out for God, but all I saw up through the water was the bright storm on the sun, and then Sils in her tiara calling my name, and then, finally, the large looming figure of Frank Morenton, clutching my rope purse—so funny, with my purse!—and looking down from the clouds, which roiled gassily about his feet and ankles like large fuzzy slippers. He looked as if he were scouting out the place, visualizing a turnstile or two and some rides. There wasn’t anything that couldn’t use a turnstile! There wasn’t anything that couldn’t benefit and prosper from Mr. Amusement! Mr. Morenton, Mr. Morenton, I said underwater. I’m very sorry, Mr. Morenton. I was near a great and peaceful death. I felt my soul leave my body yet still retain the skills of the body, so that I could actually see myself leave, waving, floating off like a balloon.
And then I was lifted up, coughing, by Reverend Filo and my counselor, Sandy. “Dear girl!” exclaimed the Reverend, who was also coughing, his hair sopping. “You just lifted off like a rocket!”
I sat on the shore in my wet cape, and let the sand cake on it. I coughed some more and spit onto the beach. Monica Hyde placed towels around me, and Sandy went to get me a can of soda. Hayden Filo sat next to me, looking disappointed, looking as if that were the most graceless, foolish baptism he’d ever seen.
“Perhaps I can try it again sometime,” I croaked.
“Perhaps,” he said distantly.
“Let’s sing a song, shall we?” said Reverend Filo. And we joined hands in a circle and sang “Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley.” When we got to the last “He had to walk it by himself,” Sandy arrived with the soda, and I stepped out of the circle and drank.
At the end of August, before I was sent to the Mount Brookfield School, my mother picked me up at camp to take me home. Getting ready to sit beside her in the car, I had a great desire to be good, a nice girl, like Monica Hyde. But it was when functioning from this desire that I felt most anxious and odd, for what I had was only a desire, not a knack. My mother did not hug me. She asked me if I had everything, and then we got in and stopped first at the nearest gas station, a Sinclair station, its bright green brontosaurus like some reptilian Baby Huey; a puffy, inverted dollar sign. She signaled to the attendant, who was on my side of the car, and as she did I noticed the swaying flesh beneath her bicep and the greenish, black-stubbled oval of her half-shaved underarm—like the prickly, peppery seeds of a tropical fruit. I had to try not to feel repelled by her. I had to remember not her frosty, scolding self, or all the sad, injured love between us, but her niceness, the bursts of energy and originality which she had sometimes bestowed upon me when I was little: sewing new, striped clothes for all my dolls, then arranging them around the room before I woke on Easter; the cakes and breads and frosting bowls she’d leave out for snacks; a dance she once did in my room one night, all by herself, when I was sick in bed and bored. The dance had ended with one of her feet propped on a chair, arms thrust skyward and held like that, her hands clutching two aluminum pie pans. She did have a sense of theater, of costume and set design, and she could make things out of nothing: hats out of rags, doormats out of bottle caps. There were times she fascinated me. But we had never been close, and it was hard for me, ever, to feel I knew her. To know something you had to be able to go inside and feel, then step outside and look, and then do that again: go inside, feel, then outside and look. You had to do it twice. That was knowledge. Two in a row. But with my mother I could only do it once. I’d do it once, the first time, then run.
“Do you feel you learned things at camp?” my mother asked suddenly, after she’d paid the station attendant and pulled away, down the road. She seemed anxious to exude something, some affection; she seemed possessed of some inarticulate goodwill—I could see it surging and flickering in her face, in a kind of confusion.
“Yes,” I said.
“Really? That’s good. What did you learn?”
What I’d learned at camp, from all the vesper readings, mostly, was that you didn’t give back to the same people who gave to you. “Let’s see,” I said, stalling. You didn’t give back to the same people at all. You gave to different people. And they, in turn, gave to someone else entirely. Not you. That was the
sloppy economy of gift and love. But that was living as a Christian—a practical Christian, but a Christian nonetheless. This, I realized, my parents already understood. Though it was probably not what they’d hoped I’d learn. “I learned that God is eternal benevolence,” I said finally, a little breathlessly.
My mother looked at me with alarm, then became quiet, watching the road. For about forty miles she said nothing, and then suddenly she started in. “Your grandmother’s looking forward to seeing you,” she said.
“I’ll visit her,” I promised.
“Silsby called to find out when you were coming home. I didn’t tell her exactly.”
“You didn’t?”
“She’s not a good influence on you, Berie. She never has been.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s too much strain in her family, the situation with her parents and all. I always felt you spent too much time over there. You should have other friends. Her family has enough to worry about.”
“There’s strain in every family. Besides, they’re not worried about me. I’m not getting in the way.”
“I’d prefer it if you didn’t see her too much right away. Take a break from the friendship.”
“I’ve had a break.”
“Silsby and I spoke for a little bit, and I told her the same thing.”
“You did what?”
“She said she wasn’t going to be around for a week anyway. She was going camping with her boyfriend, Mike, so she wanted me to tell you that and to wish you all the best at school, since it looked like she wouldn’t be able to see you.”
“Wouldn’t be able to see me?” Something stung and ached before my eyes: a picture of Sils, peeling along the lake roads on the back of the new bike Mike would surely by now have bought with the insurance money. “The crowd goes crazy!” he would shout and laugh, whipping dangerously around the curves. They’d go to the State Park campground, and in a blue pup tent lie listening to “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl” on Mike’s transistor, slapping the beat on Mike’s thighs. I felt bludgeoned and bleak and abandoned. “Mom, why did you have to say all that?” I bleated mournfully. “You didn’t have to say all that!”
“Berie,” she said, trying to sound gentle, “you needn’t make a tragic caricature of every small emotion.” And then we said nothing else, staring straight ahead at the road, or off to the side, where miles of trees had burned in a recent fire—stanch and starch the mush!—and where now toadstools were sprouting through the charred ground.
Back in Horsehearts I went over by myself, on my bicycle, to visit my Grandmother Carr. I had phoned beforehand, and she had suggested the time: two-fifteen.
The weather was cool for August, but I was warm from my bike ride. I climbed wearily up the stairs of her front porch. The door was open, and so I called through the screen. She appeared, wearing a light summer suit, her gray hair curled up in back in a twist. She showed me into her book-lined sitting room, where I had two davenports and a chesterfield to choose from. All her furniture was shadowy and hulking, like an indentured household staff. I chose the chesterfield. She brought me a cup of tea. Then she sat down across from me and sipped from her own cup. I looked down at the floor, pretending to study the busy patterns of the Persian rug. I had seldom visited her—I could have counted the times on one hand: the time when I was five and had stood in her kitchen and asked, “Grandma Carr, who is older, you or Daddy?” And she had scowled. Idiot child! Or the time when I was seven, and Claude and I brought her a gift—an old jack-in-the-box we didn’t want anymore. Or the time when I was ten and brought Sils along, and we sat at the dining table and asked for cookies. My grandmother had fetched us some graham crackers, a little mechanically. “Can we have some juice, too?” I’d asked, and after we departed, full of snacks, she phoned my mother to tell her of our rudeness and demands. When I got home, as punishment, my mother took out all the guest towels and made me iron them.
“Your father tells me you’ve been in some trouble,” my grandmother said now.
I was silent. “A little,” I said finally.
“And now they want me to send you to the Mount Brookfield School.”
“Yes,” I said. I’d forgotten my grandmother would be footing the bill. “I guess.”
She looked at me in a vaguely interested way. “Did you enjoy camp?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
“Did you?” She looked amused.
“It was interesting to meet all kinds of people from all over the state,” I said, like a walking, talking application essay.
She nodded. “We sent your father to camp once,” she said. “He was only five years old. At the time he was a little chatterbox, very cute but a chatterbox, and your grandfather and I wanted a vacation alone in Europe.” She pursed her mouth and sipped some more tea; I waited to hear a slurp but there wasn’t one. “We sent your father to a German summer camp in New Hampshire called Kinder Koop. When he came back, he was stone quiet.” She stopped for effect. “He’d become, as he would remain for the rest of his life, a shy person.”
The wordless moment now between us was long, low, sonorous as a cello note—a mix of catgut and wood, of animal and plant. “Of course, it was a mistake,” she said finally. “It was a terrible, lonely thing we did to such a tiny boy.”
Pity pooled in my throat. Dad! I drank more tea. I swallowed and coughed.
She now rose from her seat, in a change of subject, and walked dramatically around the room, as if she were in a play. My eyes followed her, and in so doing, I realized that she had no pictures of us—her children or her grandchildren—anywhere in this room. Nor did she have any elsewhere in the house, that I knew of. “When I was at conservatory,” she said, “I’d gone there after much turmoil in my life. To go from turmoil to tranquillity is excellent for music. To go from an iniquitous den to a practice room is a respite given to us by God.” She stopped and stared at me. “It is to grow wings. I hope you will find something similar for yourself at the Mount Brookfield School.”
“I hope so, too,” I said. “I mean, I don’t see why not.”
“Well, my dear …” She was still standing; she had already put her teacup down. Now she looked at her watch. “I realize you have many things to do. But I wish you all the best.” I stood up, as I guessed I was supposed to, though I still had half a cup of tea. She shook my hand and kissed me on the cheek. Suddenly I loved her very much.
“Thank you,” I said. I threw my arms around her waist and hugged her tightly. I pressed my right cheek against the pale lapels of her suit and closed my eyes. “I hope I’ll have a musical moment like that, too,” I said awkwardly, and she made a light, humming sound like a laugh and patted me on the head.
At the Mount Brookfield School I wrote to everyone: to Hayden Filo, to Claude, to my parents. I wrote to my grandmother. “Hey, Grams,” I began one letter, but then crossed it out and wrote “Dear Grandmother Carr.” By the cross-out I drew an arrow and wrote “picture of me in a new hat.” She never wrote back.
But my parents did. They said they had given my room to a Japanese foreign student and weren’t sure whether there’d be room for me to come home either fall break or Thanksgiving, though Christmas was fine.
To Sils I wrote long descriptions of the “precious, pukey campus,” of all my difficult schoolwork, of the dining hall where dogs were allowed and there was unlimited ice cream (the eccentric demands of some benefactor). I described the native attire, the preppie Scottish sweaters I refused to buy, though once I almost hocked one in town but put it back.
I dressed in what I thought was glamorous—black and gold things. Sometimes a cape or a hat or a scarf that sparkled. I arranged my face and hair in a fever of private notions: a theater of one. I wasn’t looking around. I wasn’t costuming myself in any context that was real. If I pushed it too far, if it got too glittery or tacky, I’d say to people, “Hey, at Horsehearts High this is chic.” I’d send it all up as a joke, a put-on. But if it
seemed to work, if people liked it, I would say, “Thank you,” in an earnest, whispered way. I became exotic among the preppies. I hung out with the wisecracking boys.
I got my period. The torrent of it, the bodily upheaval, filled me with happiness and dread. In drugstores I stared at the Modess and Kotex and belts and equipment, obsessed with the paraphernalia. I made directly for the back aisles and hovered there, like a robber, waiting for a slow moment in the store. I remained there in a kind of hypnosis, until something would snap me out of it, and I would wander back out, via the perfume counter, where I would spray all the testers—on my wrists, behind my ears—then step outside and get attacked by bees.
I got good grades. I learned to use the words “nebulous” and “juxtaposition,” and tried to use them as often as I could: in essay tests, or just standing in line at the dining hall.
I won an academic prize.
I developed breasts.
For a while I was still telling my flat-chested jokes. But as my own breasts grew larger, so did the disjunction between my body and my jokes, and when I would tell jokes to people, they would look at me funny. I was in a time warp. My breasts had become larger—they were large!—and I was still referring to them as mosquito bites. For a semester, an embarrassing, amphibious semester when I didn’t know who I was, what I looked like, what jokes to tell, moving from water to land, I tried to stop telling any jokes at all. I waited until I’d accumulated enough amusing lines about having big breasts, armed myself with enough invented descriptions, amassed enough self-deprecating remarks about top-heaviness—knockers, blimps, hooters, bazooms—to get me through a party, and then I told those. Getting stuck in elevators, toppling forward, not being able to see the forest for the cleavage. Alienated in a grotesque way, I would stagger forward in a kind of list, then rest my breasts on the nearest bookcase. I was doing sight gags. I didn’t care. In not caring, I became the same as everyone else: I was waiting to go far away to a big university, away from this woodsy dumping ground for half-loved kids, off to a big university that would be Relevant and Real.